Society&Design Lab Annual Methodology Workshop

This half-day workshop brings together practitioners, scholars and students to address the interconnected challenges of design and sociology, investigating methods for bridging sociological and architectural imaginations. That is, so that architects, urban designers, and landscape architects can design for the social individual and the sociologists can see and investigate the importance of space. Architects need to design for specific publics. Sociologists need to attend to the specifics of the material world in order to fully understand social dynamics.

We will explore methodologies employed by designers, activists, and community organizers in their research and practice and look for overlaps and points where these methodologies might inform the techniques employed by practitioners beyond disciplinary boundaries. Standard approaches separate the many scales that compose the built environment into disconnected categories, such as “regional design” or “suburban sociology,” without addressing interconnected and nested scales of spatial experience. This workshop explores how we might move beyond such fragmented and truncated understandings of place. The first half of the workshops will consist of brief speaker presentations and a panel discussion. The second half will consist of small group working sessions and ideas exchange between design and sociology faculty and students on their own research and applied projects.

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